Skip to content

Pairwise sequence alignments & BLAST BLAST Lab

Meg Staton edited this page Sep 24, 2016 · 5 revisions

##Goals

  • Understand how sequence alignments are generated and scored
  • Understand substitution matrices (used for scoring sequence alignments)
  • Learn to blast on newton
  • Start submitting jobs to the newton queue

Concepts to Know

  • Construct a dotplot from a simple word (for example “EPP622” against itself)
  • How biology is used to do smarter sequence alignment scoring (for both nucleotides and amino acids)
  • What are PAM and BLOSUM matrices? What are they used for?
  • Gap open vs gap extension penalties -­ why are they different?
  • Differences in needleman and wunsch vs smith and waterman
  • Differences in global and local alignments
  • What does heuristic mean?
  • BLAST ­ is it heuristic or guaranteed to give you best results?
  • What does the acronym BLAST stand for?
  • What is an E value?

##Materials

##Readings Camacho et al. 2010 BLAST+: architecture and applications

Alternate link if the other one is broken

Clone this wiki locally